Trace American economic development from European colonization through 1860, examining property, trade, production, labor, transportation, fiscal policy, banking, slavery, and recurring crises through an Austrian economic-history framework.
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Explain how universal economic concepts and contingent historical evidence can be combined to interpret institutions, material progress, and economic crises.
Compare how land, labor, capital, trade, local government, and mercantilist policies shaped northern, middle, and southern colonial development.
Analyze how war finance, taxation, inflation, trade restrictions, public debt, and disputes over centralized power affected independence and the early republic.
Explain how settlement, specialization, immigration, capital accumulation, technological change, and transportation networks transformed production, employment, markets, and living standards through 1860.
Evaluate the effects of tariffs, federal spending, debt, banking privileges, specie rules, and credit expansion on investment and the panics of 1819, 1837, and 1857.
Use production costs, capitalization, labor arrangements, and enforcement costs to examine slavery as a legally sustained component of the sectional economy.
American Economic History, Part I examines the institutions, policies, and human choices that shaped economic life from the European background to colonization through the antebellum era. Using an Austrian framework that joins economic theory with historical evidence, the course considers property rights, contracts, entrepreneurship, capital accumulation, money, banking, and changing living standards. It compares regional colonial economies, labor systems, trade networks, and mercantilist interventions before tracing the fiscal and economic consequences of imperial conflict, independence, the Articles of Confederation, and Federalist centralization. The course then follows westward settlement, agricultural specialization, manufacturing, transportation, immigration, employment, and rising material prosperity between 1790 and 1860. Federal taxation, spending, debt, tariffs, national banks, bimetallism, credit expansion, and the panics of 1819, 1837, and 1857 reveal the connections among policy, investment, and crisis. The economics of slavery completes the analysis by examining labor costs, capitalization, legal privilege, enforcement, and the sectional economy.
Chair and Professor of Economics · Grove City College
Jeffrey M. Herbener is an economist and scholar of the Austrian school whose research addresses money, business cycles, capital, interest, and economic history.
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